From the Globe and Mail:IOC wants Beijing to open Internet during OlympicsAssociated Press
April 1, 2008 at 10:38 AM EDT
BEIJING — The Internet must be open during the Beijing Olympics.
That was the message a top-ranking International Olympic Committee official delivered Tuesday to Beijing organizers during the first of three days of meetings — the last official sessions between IOC inspectors and the Chinese hosts before the games begin in just over four months.
Beijing routinely blocks Chinese access to some foreign news Web sites and blogs, a practice it has stepped up since rioting broke out over two weeks ago in Tibet.
Kevan Gosper, vice chairman of the IOC coordinating commission, said restricting access to the Internet during the games "would reflect very poorly" on the host nation.
"This morning we discussed and insisted again," Gosper said. "Our concern is that the press (should be) able to operate as it has at previous games."Gosper said the Chinese had an obligation under the "host city agreement" to provide Internet access to the 30,000 accredited and non-accredited journalists expected to attend.
"There was some criticism that the Internet closed down during events relating to Tibet in previous weeks," Gosper said.
Laws that lifted most restrictions on foreign media went into effect Jan. 1, 2007. The rules are to expire in October.
"I'm satisfied that the Chinese understand the need for this and they will do it," Gosper added.
When asked about Gosper's comments, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said China's "management" of the Internet followed the "general practice of the international community."
She acknowledged that China bans some Internet content, and said other countries did the same. She declined to say if the Internet would be unrestricted for journalists during the Olympics.
Gosper spoke after Hein Verbruggen, chairman of the inspection committee, addressed his Chinese hosts. Without being specific, Verbruggen noted that China's Aug. 8-24 games had become embroiled in controversy.
The unrest in Tibet — and China's response — has heightened calls for a boycott or a partial boycott of the games. This comes in the wake of worries over Beijing's polluted air, and calls for China to increase pressure on Sudan to end fighting in Darfur.
The Darfur issue prompted Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to step down as an artistic adviser for the opening and closing ceremonies.
The torch relay left Beijing on Tuesday for Kazakhstan and a monthlong global tour. Protests are likely at an event Chinese organizers hoped would generate positive images of the country.
"Clearly in recent times more than ever, the Beijing Games are being drawn into issues that do not necessarily have a link with the operation of the games," Verbruggen said. "We're all aware the international community is discussing these topics, but it is important to remember that our main focus during these meetings is the successful delivery of the games operations."
The IOC has refused to speak out against China's actions in Tibet, saying it is a sporting body, not a political one. It has maintained the Beijing Olympics "are a force for good" in opening up the country.Liu Qi, president of the organizing committee, told Verbruggen the preparations were in the "final stage" but suggested the hosts would not let up.
"There's a saying in China that if you want to walk 100 steps — though you have walked 90 — you have finished only half the journey. We still have 10 steps left, and those 10 are very critical to the whole journey."
The People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, warned in an editorial Tuesday that troubles lie ahead in the four months before the games.
"With the opening of the games approaching, the burden on our shoulders is heavier and the task tougher," it said. "We must keep a clear head, improving our awareness of the potential dangers, and bravely facing all the difficulties and challenges."
Why Tibet is boiling overAs protests spread beyond Lhasa, The Globe examines the environmental, economic and demographic grievances at the root of the bitter conflict
GEOFFREY YORK
From Friday's Globe and Mail
March 21, 2008 at 3:44 AM EDT
More than 100 armed soldiers are camped out in military vehicles in the parking lot of the hotel where Luorang works. His town is locked down, its people trapped inside their homes, ordered to stay off the streets.
But when The Globe and Mail reaches him by telephone, the 35-year-old Tibetan ignores the nearby soldiers and agrees to talk. He is eager to explain why people in his community are angry enough to join the fiercest wave of Tibetan protests in almost 20 years.
His words tumble out. He talks of a sacred mountain, holy to the Tibetans, the site of a Tibetan festival, where Chinese mining companies are blasting for gold and silver mines. He talks of the disappearing forests and how there is nothing left for traditional Tibetan medicine. He describes how China prohibited his town from receiving a group of monks from Lhasa last year, and how the monks of his town were banned from travelling to other monasteries.
"If they take away the water and the soil and the resources, how will our people continue to live here?" he asks.
"If our people did not believe in Buddhism, they would have rioted a long time ago. We endured and endured. But now finally it is difficult to endure any more."
Luorang's community, an ethnically Tibetan region in Western China, was one of dozens of Tibetan towns that joined the explosion of anti-government protests over the past week.
(The name of his town is not being disclosed to protect him from government reprisals.) When the Buddhist monks of his town rushed onto the streets on March 15, the fate of their holy mountain was one of their biggest grievances.
While the global spotlight was focused on the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, perhaps the most significant and historic development this week was the rapid spread of the protests to the far-flung Tibetan communities of Western China, including the provinces of Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai and Yunnan.
The Chinese authorities admitted yesterday, for the first time, that the protests had swept across a wide swath of ethnically Tibetan districts, far beyond the borders of the official Tibetan region where Lhasa is located.
"One of the most striking things is that we're now hearing of protests in places where we never heard of monks protesting before," said Robert Barnett, a Tibet specialist at Columbia University in New York.
The scale of the uprising, and the violence on both sides, has shocked the world. But for those who were paying attention, the signs of revolt had been visible for months, if not years.
While there is little doubt that the Tibetans are aware of the Beijing Olympics, and the potential impact of their demonstrations in an Olympic year, a closer look at their uprising shows that most of their protests were spontaneous, often in reaction to repressive Chinese measures, and usually had their roots in a vast array of local issues, including environmental, economic and demographic grievances.
"With or without the Olympics, the situation in Tibet is very grave," said Thubten Samphel, a spokesman for the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile.
"The Tibetan people have deep-seated resentments. They feel marginalized and isolated from economic development in Tibet. They feel that they're being reduced to a minority in their own land. They feel very fearful about the survival of their culture and their identity. These are the underlying roots, the sense of despair that they feel. The Olympics may have been a factor, but they were not the major factor."
Consider, for example, a clash between Chinese security forces and hundreds of ordinary Tibetans in Qinghai province last month, more than two weeks before the latest wave of protests began.
It began, oddly enough, with a balloon seller.
On Feb. 21, during a fireworks festival in the town of Tongren in Qinghai province, a Tibetan child tried to buy a balloon from a Chinese vendor. They argued over the price, and the vendor reportedly slapped the child in the face. When an older man began fighting with the balloon seller, the man was allegedly beaten and detained by a Chinese policeman, who was soon surrounded by a crowd of Tibetans.
Hundreds of police reinforcements arrived, violence erupted, stones were hurled, dozens of police and Tibetans were injured, several police vehicles were destroyed and about 200 Tibetans, including monks, were arrested, according to reports last month by Tibetan activist groups and Radio Free Asia.
The next day, several thousand Tibetans marched to the government offices to demand the release of the detainees. The Tibetans chanted "Long Live the Dalai Lama" and pro-independence slogans, until most of the detainees were released.
"Something as small as a balloon can spark it," said Matt Whitticase, a spokesman for the London-based Free Tibet group. "It shows how frayed the Tibetan feelings are. They feel that they are treated as second-class citizens."
Many analysts say the current wave of protests can be traced back to two key events in 2006: the completion of the new railway to Lhasa, which has brought millions of Chinese tourists and migrants to Tibet, and the appointment of a tough new Communist regional boss, Zhang Qingli, who announced a "life or death" battle against the Dalai Lama.
Mr. Zhang is a member of China's ethnic Han majority, and in an interview in August of 2006, he admitted that he spoke "just a few words" of the Tibetan language. He regarded the Tibetans as children who must be indoctrinated with a love of China, rather than a love of Buddhism.
"Those who do not love their country are not qualified to be human beings," Mr. Zhang said in one interview.
"The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need," he said on another occasion. "The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans."
Under Mr. Zhang's hard-line rule, Tibetans were forced to endure a near-constant diet of mandatory "patriotic education" sessions, along with a host of other restrictive measures, including bans on religious activity by Tibetan students and officials. Arrests of Tibetan dissidents increased threefold in 2007, compared with the previous year. The crackdown was "extraordinarily vigorous" and triggered massive discontent in Tibet, said Prof. Barnett, the Columbia University scholar.
"There was a whittling down of the Tibetan culture," he said. "There was no security threat from Tibet, so why did China's policies need to turn so hard-line in the past two years? All of this really exacerbated the situation in Tibet."
The "patriotic education" campaigns, which forced monks to denounce the Dalai Lama and declare allegiance to China, had previously been held once or twice a year. But after Mr. Zhang's arrival, some monasteries began receiving education campaigns for up to 18 days a month. Some monks refused to sign formal statements denouncing the Dalai Lama, and one monk reportedly committed suicide rather than sign the statement.
In July, 2007, China introduced another restriction: a rule that Tibetan lamas were not permitted to reincarnate into "living Buddhas" without government permission. It was a direct attack on one of the pillars of traditional Tibetan Buddhist belief.
The railway, meanwhile, was bringing a huge influx of Han Chinese into Lhasa, turning it increasingly into a Chinese-dominated city. Even in the city's ancient centre, around the sacred Jokhang temple, Chinese shopkeepers and Chinese tourists soon outnumbered the Tibetans. On the roof of the Jokhang temple, Chinese tourists harassed the monks, grabbing them and forcing them to pose for photos. The monks openly told journalists of their dislike of the new railway.
"The Tibetans saw it as a second invasion," said Tsering Wangdu Shakya, a Tibetan scholar at the University of British Columbia."They felt swamped by the Chinese. It was Sinicizing the whole region. Thousands of tourists were pouring in, and prices were going up."
Beginning last summer, there was a noticeable upsurge in protests by Tibetans across the official Tibetan region and in the broader Tibetan ethnic sphere in Western China.
In one district of Sichuan province, for example, about 300 Tibetan villagers smashed mining equipment and attacked workers in an attempt to halt Chinese mining activities on a sacred Tibetan mountain. As recently as March 6, there was another little-noticed protest in the same district of Sichuan.When the latest protests began in Lhasa last week, nobody should have been surprised. Indeed, the Lhasa riots may have been sparked by an overreaction from Chinese security forces who were anticipating a protest by the monks on March 10, a frequent date for protests because it is the anniversary of the 1959 uprising against Chinese rule that led the Dalai Lama to flee to India.
Video footage of the March 10 incident, filmed by Chinese security forces and broadcast by the BBC yesterday, shows that it began with a simple sit-down by a group of monks at a Lhasa monastery. Four days later, Lhasa was in flames.
Pic above: The contemprary Chinese photography exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria.
